Here I lurk

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The basic premise of Indieweb is that you tend to deal in public content, public discourse. But I only do that on Twitter and Mastodon, really. On social networks which permit it, like G+ and the Unnameable One, I like my privacy.

Even on Twitter and Mastodon, I don’t try to get “famous” or get a lot of likes or reshares from strangers or anything, I just would rather talk to a few interesting people.

OK, apparently my first N posts are going to be me grumbling about WordPress. The default theme has this gigantic image of a potted plant taking up the entire screen, making you scroll up if you want to see any text. Seriously, guys.

Gravatar is creepy. It’s a picture (or abstraction) that follows you around to different blogs and appears wherever you comment, even if you didn’t intend it to, just because you gave the site owner your email address. Gravatar tracks you around the web just like Google/Facebook and such, and it is recognized as a tracker by software that blocks trackers.

I’m going to the WordPress profile page to set up my profile and it says that if I want to set a picture I have to do it through Gravatar? Really, WordPress?

Is this going to turn into a very short blog full of things that eventually drive me away from WordPress?

update: somebody made a plugin to undo the crappy decision of publishing a hash of everybody’s email address to the world if they comment on a blog.

So wordpress people want you pretty bad to install “Jetpack” and thereby connect your wordpress site to the wordpress dot com universe.

One thing it will do for you is put “share” buttons on the bottom of all your posts so the facebooks and googles of the world can track your visitors, which, no thank you. Anybody I care about reading this is capable of sharing a thing onto social media without having a special spy button there to do it.

I’m looking around the plugin (because it will give you stats, and that’s nice) and it seems to be full of attempted upsells (I guess I should get used to that in the wordpress plugin world), and generally ways to tie your site to the wordpress dot com borg. :\

I mean, if I wanted to be dependent on a benevolent overlord for my infrastructure I’d just post on facebook.

I don’t know man.

I guess one nice thing about it is that it’s made by the wordpress team themselves, so, it’s most likely going to be more on-top-of-it securitywise than some plugin from Johnny Rando, however nice that might be.

And why not? It’s there for me. I don’t have to be too cool for WordPress. Last time I decided I was too cool for wordpress I trashed an art blog I’d put years of work into, thinking I’d put something better up to replace it, and I never did. Kind of self-destructive.

Still, I’m keeping wordpress here in a subdirectory of my domain, in case I decide it has to go, or I want to mess with something else instead. I hear good things about the CMS Known, and I even set it up. It was kind of cool. Very Indieweb-focused.

Hearing about the Indieweb movement was in fact what motivated me to go reinstall WordPress and give it a fling. It seems like a really spiffy idea. I might activate some relevant plugins/themes for it and see how they go. the